Abstract
BackgroundClinical supervision by a senior therapist is a very common practice in psychotherapist training and psychiatric care settings. Though clinical supervision is advocated by most educational and governing institutions, the effects of clinical supervision on the supervisees’ competence, e.g., attitudes, behaviors, and skills, as well as on treatment outcomes and other patient variables are debated and largely unknown. Evidence-based practice is advocated in clinical settings but has not yet been fully implemented in educational or clinical training settings. The aim of this systematic review is to synthesize and present the empirical literature regarding effects of clinical supervision in cognitive-behavioral therapy.MethodsThis study will include a systematic review of the literature to identify studies that have empirically investigated the effects of supervision on supervised psychotherapists and/or the supervisees’ patients. A comprehensive search strategy will be conducted to identify published controlled studies indexed in the MEDLINE, EMBASE, PsycINFO, and Cochrane Library databases. Data on supervision outcomes in both psychotherapists and their patients will be extracted, synthesized, and reported. Risk of bias and quality of the included studies will be assessed systematically.DiscussionThis systematic review will rigorously follow established guidelines for systematic reviews in order to summarize and present the evidence base for clinical supervision in cognitive-behavioral therapy and may aid further research and discussion in this area.Systematic review registrationPROSPERO CRD42016046834
Highlights
Clinical supervision by a senior therapist is a very common practice in psychotherapist training and psychiatric care settings
Supervision has generally been viewed as a necessary and essential part of psychotherapist training but surprisingly, little empirical research has been conducted on the effects of clinical psychotherapy supervision, and the evidence for the causal mechanism in the educational pyramid is limited [5, 6]
This systematic review will provide a synthesis on the effects of clinical supervision in a cognitive behavior therapy context and the evidence for using such interventions
Summary
Review inclusion criteria The format, content, and effects of supervision probably vary across contexts, and in order to make a review relevant and meaningful, there must be a balance between too strict and too liberal inclusion criteria. The supervision should provide training in theories, methods, and skills used in the cognitive-behavioral therapy (CBT) framework and the supervisees should provide treatments within this framework This includes psychotherapy based mainly on cognitive and behavioral theories and models or more broadly on evolutionary psychology and learning theory. Extracted data include study design, study setting; study population; sample size; participant demographics; supervisor competence and characteristics; supervisee competence and characteristics; type of supervision and characteristics; patient group or population; treatment type and characteristics, data collection procedures; outcome measures, quality of outcome measures; main findings and study information for assessment of risk for bias. If results from included studies cannot be synthesized directly, qualitative summarizations will be conducted in order to provide general conclusions for the study questions
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